Decoding Rain’s 2014 Album "Rain Effect"

An Attempt to Uncover Hidden Messages in the Light of the Background Stories

You can find the original article in Hungarian here →

(Author's screenshot)

In case the name does not ring a bell for someone:
Rain, whose real name is Jung Ji-hoon, is a Korean solo singer, dancer, and actor. Like many performers around the world, he was also inspired by Michael Jackson to choose a musical career. He debuted as a soloist at the age of twenty in 2002. He is among the most popular and respected artists across Asia, but he was also the first Korean performer to play at Madison Square Garden. Already in 2005, he received a historic Grand Slam shower of awards: he achieved a triple success by winning the most important MTV awards in the South Korean, Japanese, and Chinese/Taiwanese regions. The film-loving audience of the world could get to know him through the Wachowski sisters as the leading actor of Ninja Assassin (or, before that, as Taejo in Speed Racer), as well as the main character of Park Chan-wook's film titled I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK (receiving an MTV Movie Award for the former, while the latter film won the Berlinale Alfred Bauer Prize). Nowadays, several of his series can be seen on streaming services, including Red Swan (Disney Plus) and Bloodhounds 2 (Netflix). His most recent musical release is the track titled Feel It in May 2026.

The top row compiles Rain’s complete subsequent album discography (Source: music.bugs.co.kr),
while the bottom row frames his cinematic journey, juxtaposing his foundational early acting roles with his most recent work (Author's screenshots)

Let's begin our retrospective journey into the 2014 reality of the album's birth:

Rain's last album dated back to 2009, and the path leading up to it was also very interesting. Rain's musical world showed a peculiar transformation after he got out from under JYP's wings. Following his becoming independent—or rather, becoming his own master—already Rainism, but even more so Back To The Basic, was a resolute return to the starting point, which can be identified with the harder musical world of Bad Guy. The newer songs, occasionally already bearing Rain's name as a composer, clearly received a more metallic sound, often with guitar and drum bases characteristic of harder rock, though they preserved their richness in genres and styles. This was much more conspicuous in the sound of the concerts than on the studio albums, where at times the thundering of a serious rock band filled the space. One of the reasons for my curiosity was whether Rain would continue this direction, or if he could continue it at all?

Why? Because during the four years, the trends of K-pop changed as well, and no matter how sovereign a creator Rain is, first and foremost, the reality of the Korean entertainment industry is his lifeblood. And in that, interesting phenomena reared their heads. From the endless sea of cloying pop ballads—which started with the stifled voice of a dying swan and endlessly self-repeated, but without exception culminated in vocal soaring—and songs building on the "jump-around-rap-jump-around" schema that often carried the pulse of local festival music, those were able to stand out who either openly embraced the absolute brainlessness of this mainstream and subverted it in its own inverted way by deploying the full toolkit of Dada (e.g., Big Bang), or, sensing and riding the "rebellion without a cause" of the young beneficiaries of the consumer society, were able to give voice to this mood filled with suppressed, helpless rage in their songs (e.g., B.A.P.). Perhaps I do not need to write down that this polarized and overly generalized characterization does not need to include the top-tier representatives of the genre, since they possess the marks of sovereignty beyond the genre schemas. Along with all this, electro-music influences and artificial autotunes dominated the world of tracks, perfectly reflecting the musical imprint of a technologized society fabricated with electronic devices. It is a particular curiosity that, as a sure sign of the overproduction crisis, younger and younger "idols" dominate the field, which anyway builds on the emotional world of teenagers.

What can a creator do in this world whose entire existence and artistic image was built from the guilt of the bad boy who wants to reform and henceforth wants to serve the good, and from the motifs of "let's perform to the maximum because that is what wins its reward in the end," while his musical taste is rooted in the sensual, playful world of smooth jazz, soul, and R&B? Moreover, the ten years of a magical career now weighed on Rain's shoulders as an oppressive burden in the sense that everyone was watching with eagle eyes to see what this battle-hardened veteran—who is still terribly young, being only thirty-one years old, yet counts as a "grand old man" in the pop scene—would put on the table as a "big hit," especially after a two-year forced hiatus, with a thoroughly tarnished reputation.


The Military Incident and the Media Onslaught: Hero to Zero?

The other reason for my immense curiosity was precisely how Rain would pour out of himself that immense amount of disappointment and bitterness that he gathered completely unexpectedly—and in reality, completely unfairly—during his military service. Because I took it for granted that we would receive some kind of answer to these on the new record, since how else would a musician process the good and bad experiences of their life other than by singing them out of themselves, framed in music and lyrics.

It is also no secret that the release of the record can be compared to the turning points of the most exciting dramas: the moment arrived where the fate of the protagonist stands or falls. Therefore, with bated breath, I awaited the release time of four o'clock in the morning in our country, naturally as a "fan" who worries for Rain's fate, loves and respects him very much, but is not without criticism.

I must also recall the image we preserve of Rain from his last active days, back in the fall of 2011, before the military machine swallowed him up. We saw a performer standing at the pinnacle of a dizzying, decade-long career that started from the very bottom; fully aware of the value of his achievements, he occupied his literally manifested regal place at the top of the genre’s hierarchy during his final concert, burning this image deeply into the consciousness of the audience. At the same time, Rain, as always, unintentionally revealed his more vulnerable feelings as well—his fear that the two-year forced hiatus could destroy the results of all his struggles up to that point. And because he is a person blessed with extremely sensitive instruments, it was as if all his other senses beyond the five physical ones suggested some ominous foreboding, which provided an explanation for his hypersensitive state before his enlistment.

Unfortunately, his premonitions did not deceive him. After a year-long series of military achievements performed like a superhero, trouble struck, and a massive one at that, making it doubtful whether it would be possible to stand back up. Fate wove the threads in such a way that, precisely due to his prominent public role, Rain became the subject of a surreal story. In this story, political infighting, the ambivalent feelings of the Korean people regarding mandatory military service, the overheated patriotic expectations due to the de jure state of war, and the ineffective criticism of the incompetent, corruptible leadership of military affairs that gave cause for attacks all materialized in an incredible hype.

At the origin of this hype, the media positioned the most well-known subject possible, Rain, regardless of whether he could have had any role at all in the current aspects of the hype—yet they turned his name into a trigger word for the scent of scandal in the media. Yet, his offense was merely that during a few seconds of transferring from a car to a taxi, he did not properly wear the cap that goes with the military uniform, which paparazzi—constantly breathing down his neck even during his military time—captured and then presented as a tabloid sensation in the press. While this is indeed mandatory according to the rulebook, it is not so on the heads of private soldiers and their superiors in everyday reality.

They even spread a false accusation claiming that Rain met with his famous actress girlfriend during his official leaves, but this did not prove to be true during the subsequent investigation, which, of course, no longer interested anyone. However, the rumor alone was enough to incite public anger. Since celebrities serving in the military are completely defenseless against the attacks that hit them during their service time (as even public verbal statements are forbidden for them), the ultimate result was the discharge of a star brought into bad repute with a tarnished renown, and personally, a young man who honorably withstood the pressure weighing on him, but was nevertheless spiritually tormented, living under the pressure of terrible stress for long months, and who had lost weight because of it.

After the torture of the last half-year of military service, another half-year of silence followed, without a single statement. No one knew what was happening with Rain, how he was processing what had happened to him, and whether he would pick up the gauntlet thrown down at him, or if, becoming disillusioned, he would rather retreat and become a monk. The latter was also a quite likely scenario.

My first impressions

Since one could sample the songs of the record fastest on the iTunes Store page—literally, because as a purchasing incentive, they provide a 1-1.5 minute listening opportunity for the songs—I tackled this immediately, naturally along with many thousands of others.

And then... I thought I wasn’t hearing right. The musical samples revealed a strong electro-sound, strange high-pitched singing, rap inserts, and some unmistakable K-pop feeling. The familiar Rain-voice—that husky, yet velvet-brown, stroking voice—was simply nowhere to be found. My first feeling was immense disappointment; somehow, I felt that Rain and his new agency had made a poor decision because they forcedly wanted to race against the currently trendy artists of the K-pop mainstream, specifically by striking a sound similar to theirs—of course, as a sort of declaration of war, showing that they could easily do such a thing too. I found this to be a complete mistake, and I don't even need to mention that there was no trace anywhere of the hard sound flirting with rock. However, I saw the titles of the tracks: Baby, Marilyn Monroe, Superman... and I thought, why must everything be done to win the favor of America? Furthermore, I also thought that it is certainly impossible to win over there in this manner, if that were the goal. Having gotten over the first shock, of course, I waited for the album to download and started listening to Rain Effect in its entirety—and from track to track, a strange, brand-new, yet very familiar realm opened up before me, which minute by minute revealed its values and brought my entire being under its influence. I hereby apologize to Rain for forgetting for a moment that in his person, I am dealing with a sovereign creator of exceptional quality.

Finally: the album itself

So, let’s see the album, which I have since been able to hold in my hands in its physical release as well. Although I treat it as a single album due to the near-total identity of the musical material, we can actually speak of two releases: the original CD-sized edition and the deluxe box set special edition.

(Author's screenshots)

Its title: RAIN EFFECT. This is straight talk; there is no need to analyze its confidence. Rain has an effect—this is the voice of self-confidence. The packaging of the album seems modest compared to the over-designed K-pop albums, and it reflects well on Rain’s current verbal message: "I have eliminated all greed within myself." At the same time, its appearance is extremely elegant, and it has a surprising visual element: the case is a double CD case, and by opening the front, we can perceive that the cover is not just a metallic, 3D-effect photo, but a plastically formed translucent element has been placed over the silver print; this provides the special, radiant effect. The embossed cover of the accompanying photo book plays further with the image of silvery rainwater, and the typography of the lettering is also a perfect hit. The Special Edition carries these design elements further. The front element of the transparent plastic case refracts the light like a prism, while the separate CD holder inside shapes a water droplet over the disc. But my favorite is the tiny detail that even the barcode is shaped like a raindrop. The photo book is, of course, much richer, and it is also accompanied by a notebook.

(Author's screenshot)

The graphic design of the first double page of the photo book is very beautiful, the way it evokes the feeling of trickling rain by arranging the titles of the tracks into vertical lines. Inside, from all the photos, a young man with a smileless, extremely serious, and pure face looks at us, who, although visibly freshly kissed by a woman, wears the mark of the lipsticked lips on his face with the exact same naturalness as the tons of jewelry on his fingers.
 

(Author's screenshot)

There is something aristocratic about his appearance; the pictures evoke paintings depicting the highly self-respecting, jeweled, fur-wrapped male nobles of old times. Yet the man is ultra-modern, along with the fact that the retro feeling of the eighties somehow echoes back from the photos as well. This man, although seemingly a self-contradiction, is understatedly provocative, and because of this, his charisma is certainly extremely powerful. It is clear that he has a secret he does not want to share, and his attraction lies precisely in this mystery, which calls forth female principles: for just like in the story of Duke Bluebeard, every woman wants to open that certain seventh door.

(Author's screenshot)

In the strongly icy-feeling silver-white dominance of the packaging, the "heart" of the CD box, the disc containing the songs, is a fresh blood-red color, and this same color echoes back in the word "effect" as well, which, knowing the precedents, offers opportunities for an extreme number of associations.

For the design of the packaging of Rain Effect, +1 point goes to Rain.

Without exception, the lyrics of the songs are credited to Rain, and let’s look at the composers... well, look at that, we find his name at every single song as well, and JR Groove is indicated as co-composer. Therefore, we can hear an author’s album in every sense. This is a novelty, though not without precedents, since Rainism, or the two leading tracks from four years ago, Hip Song and Love Song, are also Rain’s own music.

1. Rain Effect  🎧

Just like on Rain’s previous records, the album begins with an opening salvo. Up until now, the sounds of either whispering rain or thunder served as atmospheric intros, but these are nowhere to be found now. Instead, we power up as if we were embarking on a mission aboard a super-spaceship emerging from an ocean, with a vehicle powered by some kind of fuel called Rain Effect. I remembered a meme circulating on the net, according to which the image of rain brings the word 'rain' to the mind of every English speaker, except for the admirers of our current performer, who immediately associate it with 'Rain.' Well, on this album, there is no longer any need for the sounds of nature’s rain, because the person in question is THE RAIN himself. A powerful opening salvo. By the way, we could already know the music as the musical accompaniment to one of the music video teasers.

It also belongs to the sphere of preliminary knowledge that the record has two 'title songs,' though neither of their titles is identical to the title of the record. Since Rain’s private personality, and consequently his stage persona as well, cannot be described as one-dimensional, they probably decided on this solution due to the presentation of the two dominant image elements with equal strength.

2. 30 Sexy 🎧 🎬

As the entrance to the album, in the definitive place of the first track, following the 'Thirty sexy, thirty, thirty, Thirty sexy, thirty, thirty' acapella introduction, we launch with eight massive drum beats that hit all the way to the viscera, which thud all the way through in the background, but the main musical motif is dominated by some kind of voluptuous elongation. This is dance music at its finest, which is erotically provocative. Not a teen disco, but the tingling (exciting) game of mature sexualities, specifically drawing attention to the fact that maturity stemming from age hides deeper and more extraordinary excitements.

If we pay attention to the lyrics, it turns out that we also get an underlying meaning: the eccentric male character’s mating dance, which entices women yet places his own erotic charisma at the center, takes place on stage, in the light of the spotlights, and the object of seduction might not even be a single woman, but THE WOMAN, all of them who dance together with THE MAN in the space dominated by pheromones. This is a surprising and playful confession about the efficacy of the individual experiencing the fulfillment of their gender, and of the stage persona keeping the audience under the spell of a somewhat narcissistic version of this same power.

Rain takes advantage of the English linguistic playing field to the fullest extent with the help of a tiny slip: he continuously pronounces the word 'thirty' audibly as 'dirty.' Whether intentionally? His English is much too good for us to blame this on his accent. The music is once again a double game, because although it is a powerfully rhythmic party music that induces contemporary pop-music ears to dance, it nevertheless also blends the world of what is by now retro-pop into itself; the falsettos of the refrains especially conjure up the sounds of Earth, Wind & Fire, even specifically September, which Rain sang with such great love as the encore surprise of his last concert tour.

3. La Song 🎧 🎬

As a sharp shift, to the sounds of a brass band, we drop into a Latin carnival atmosphere, into which exciting Afro-rhythms blend in a matter of moments. If I wrote about the drum beats of 30 Sexy that they are massive, then I don't even know what adjective fits the heavily cracking deep sounds of the brass instruments here. Their continuous pulsation creates the atmosphere of a street party, into which, like a musical orgy, the chorus of the crowd singing together blends alongside the rap, as well as the asymmetrical game conjured up by the rhythm section with percussion and the sounds of the beatbox. The dynamics of the track delight with rich variety; it is exciting how during the 'dance time' he can suppress the loudness of the basic atmosphere for the sake of the masterly interplay of the guitar-percussion-beatbox, which we find as if peeking into a side street, so that turning back, the flowing mainstream of the carnival hits us with even greater force.

(Author's screenshot)

If the protagonist of 30 Sexy is the sophisticated and somewhat mysterious man, then here as a counterpoint we find the heartbreakingly charming street rascal who survives even on the back of ice, who has no idea about sophisticated pleasures because he looks for the primary joys of life in everything—and finds them. He is certainly not lonely; buddies, women, and stuff thought to be good surround him and accompany his every step. Wherever he goes, good cheer follows, to the greatest joy of all of us. Let’s just remember: director Park Chan-wook also mentioned as a fundamental characteristic of Rain that he is "mischievous" at every possible moment. In La Song, Rain shows another thousand kinds of possibilities of his slightly husky but powerfully ringing, natural timbre, with which he also smuggles numerous acting performances into the song. Naturally, rap does not pose too great a challenge for him either. Fitting for the song, the lyrics are direct, they do not try to say more than necessary, but they do so in the appropriate language of slang.

After the title songs, the record serves up another surprise, because it seems that there remained an unprocessed problem in the topic of the male-female relationship.

4. Oppa (feat.HYUN A) (어디 가요. 오빠 / Where Are You Going, Oppa?) 🎧

We have arrived at perhaps the most extraordinary track on the record, a duet sung with HyunA, in which the tension between the trivial textual content and the arrangement of the song hides the key to the solution. Of course, only if I am well mistaken. For those who are just getting acquainted with K-pop: girls address both their beloved and their famous favorites as 'oppa' (older brother), and they are capable of repeating this with some spine-chillingly affected whining. In the song, a girl is "oppa-ing" in its most annoying form, asking the boy to hang out with her instead of going about his own business again. Interestingly, the boy answers the girl in the plural ("Play by yourselves, oppa has a lot of things to do").

Why on earth? Perhaps because the song revolves around the fact that all girl fans want the exact same thing from the star of their hearts: continuous 'entertainment,' just as girls in love want exclusive 'care.' Although the boy knows that the girl is right when she warns him that his life will pass by if he only cares about his profession as a performer, he nevertheless flees to the stage, where he can fall in love with all those women whom he is incapable of loving outside the stage. The text is a simple lovers' tiff, in which the girl demandingly affects airs and the boy answers the woman/women, who are slightly a burden to him, with affectionate patience, but the music lifts this dialogue away from primary reality from the very first moment. The eerie vibration playing in the background reinterprets the text and makes it a game of internal, spiritual force fields. The boy is only present in his words, because it is as if he carries the vibration within himself, which keeps him captive in another world.

How did Rain put it? When he steps onto the stage, he still shivers, he becomes electrified. This moment indeed occurs in the song when the force field, which until then was only vibrating, almost explodes, and this is the moment when the synchronization of man and woman occurs in the shared rhythm of the heartbeat. Yet, the conceptual duality still remains in the lyrics: the girl thinks that the boy is finally vibrating on the same wavelength as her, while the boy speaks about the ecstatic experience of virtual lovemaking with every woman born on the stage.

Rain has already formulated several times that he has arrived at that threshold of his life when he longs for a real relationship, and he knows how much he lost in his twenties that counts as a naturally lived experience for his contemporaries (of course, he gained plenty of other things instead of these, he is aware of this too). The problem is nonetheless latently there in the text and the music: can such a virtual relationship experience substitute for reality? The song somewhat modifies Karinthy's summation about the futility of love relationships, according to which the mission is impossible because the woman wants the man, while the man wants the woman. In Rain's case, the situation seems even more hopeless: the woman here too wants the man entirely, while the man wants his own life, in which a woman would nonetheless come in handy. The female performer of the duet, HyunA, is an excellent partner for Rain in this masterly little piece.

5. Marilyn Monroe 🎧

Upon reading the title, after the previous ones, I really did not know what to prepare for. However, from the plucking of the very first guitar sound of the song, golden Californian sunshine flooded everything in the room, and the opening word of the song, 'Beautiful,' resounded with such warmth and innocent wonderment that the essence of Rain’s unparalleled performing ability and the purest traits of his being were condensed into it. The song of intimately simple beauty beautifully refutes the previous one, or rather, perhaps much more pushes the problem contained within it into place: there is no trouble here, since if the real, grand emotion comes, it conjures a playful and innocent youth out of all of us again. We know that the core experience of Rain's past year was a new love, and the lady happens to be a beautiful actress. Of course, everyone immediately started questioning him, so this song is a love confession, right? Rain, with his stoic smile, only answered that well, last year he watched the movie titled Marilyn Monroe released in theaters, and he was fascinated by the star's beauty. And we believe him. Why shouldn't we? Though, of course, we would love to be this much in love...

(Author's screenshot)

6. Baby (차에 타봐/ Get in the Car) 🎧

If the previous opus belonged to love, then here is its most bitter concomitant right away: jealousy. And what do we hear? The fleeing oppa of the third track already wants to possess the lady of his heart entirely, and it even completely unhinges him that he sensed a foreign scent on her. What sorrow, shame, self-torment, and desire for retaliation resound in this song! And although it hurts a lot, the whole thing is still soft, like Rain, who fundamentally could not hurt a fly. But be careful anyway, because because of this, he can still land a heavy blow on someone.

7. SUPERMAN 🎧

First of all: like this, in all capital letters. A top-tier, playful track, one of the highlights of the record. Electro sound and a rhythm orgy at its finest. Rain makes three characters speak: the girl and Superman, in his dual form. Sounds never heard before burst out of him, and this cheerfulness suits him terribly well. The text is also humorous, launching with an acrostic: from the starting letters of the lines of the first stanza, the word SUPER can be read. This is the song of the man who wants to and can dazzle a woman, who is indeed a super Superman capable of miracles—if this is called forth from him. Because the one and true woman capable of doing so is nonetheless needed for this.

(Author's screenshot)

8. I Know (알아버렸어 / I Found Out) 🎧

It is as if the line of love songs continues with the memory of a painful breakup. As if. Yet this is the text during whose translation the feeling grew stronger and stronger within me that this might not be the case after all. The in medias res, heart-wrenching, suffocating "keep keep keep keep you stand up" piercing into the silence—which is a desperate self-encouragement to "stay standing, endure" all of this, do not collapse under the pressure of what happened—already offered a strong double meaning. Throughout the text, there are lines that can be interpreted in two ways, which can equally be the imprints of a romantic disappointment or, in a roundabout way, tell the story of the past year’s disillusionment.

It wasn’t even a minute, perhaps, while you left me, 
how could I forgive you?
It’s too late anyway, I’ve already seen through 
your treacherous pretense and too many lies.

How on earth did the two of us end up here like this? Ah… 
I will really erase you, and I will forget you!

It is time already that I can leave you, erase you. 
I am drifting, just like the wind and the clouds,
I love you, but still, I might not be able to see you anymore. 
Ah… there is no air… air… here, I am suffocating… 
Though my heart is breaking, I will leave you nonetheless, 
Memory, if you are a thorn, I will simply cast you out!

Could one speak more clearly than this about the disappointment that Rain must have experienced due to the public mood that suddenly became hostile toward him? Due to the baseless persecution? Due to the fact that with his ten years of efforts and stunning results, he did not earn the slightest credit with many people? In the arrangement of the track, the musical vibration of Where Are You Going, Oppa? returns; a similarly agitated vibration dominates here as well, making the alarm of the lonely soul quite terrifying.

If the previous track was the highlight of playfulness, then now we have arrived at the musical climax of the album. Although it will not be a disco hit, Rain nevertheless included all the pain and bitterness that he experienced in the previous year. What he sings in it is not least an exceptional performing achievement either.

My suspicion regarding the interpretation is turned almost into a certainty by the place the song occupies on the album, because what follows after it, I Found Out is a clear prelude to it.

9. Dear Mama Don't Cry 🎧

Judging by the title, we have arrived at the most concerning song on the record. We know the backstory, the fact that Rain carries deep within himself a trauma that can perhaps never be processed. Yet, it was strange to see that we encounter such a song on the record of a man specifically appealing to his adulthood. But like almost every track throughout the entire album, this one caused a surprise too. Because there is no question of crying over old pain again. There is no question of trying to win back the sympathy of the audience by deploying cheap tricks. There is a much more brutal reckoning in this immensely pure song.

Why on earth must it be endlessly proven to the mother, who has been dead for fourteen years, repeating incessantly that she does not need to cry? In fact, why is the mother crying, watching her son’s fate from somewhere in another existence? Rain did not write a single word stating that what happened to him last year was a tragedy. He did not write a single word stating that what happened hurt him very much. He did not write a single word stating that he might have doubts about whether it was worth spending ten years of his youth in the service of the audience that he placed before everything else and loved, yet which treacherously betrayed him. A mother can feel these doubts. A mother who made her son promise that he would do everything to live this life. And life granted everything she wished for her son. Except that at this moment, the meaning of every sacrifice became doubtful. That of the mother, who died in the struggle for a livelihood, and that of the boy, who performing beyond his strength turned the maternal dream into reality, which was naturally his own as well.

This is the song of a reckoning, and specifically of a very tough, manly reckoning, in which it is stated that "But I made it. I fulfilled what you wanted for me." This is the cornerstone of self-evaluation, which is the most important point of alignment. The rest is the whimsical game of fate. Thus, it also gains meaning why there is nothing to cry about over what happened. And most importantly, from here, one can stand back up, and with dignity at that, for the continuation. Or one can close the accounting with the past.

The repetitive structure of the song, Rain’s infinitely gentle pleading, and the pulsation of the drums accompanying the singing—imitating a heartbeat—create immense tension. The most important sentence of the text is delivered almost hidden, as a line of rap spoken in a faded, tapping voice, which on the one hand testifies to an infinitely tasteful moderation, and on the other hand is a solution that speaks for itself. That the song nonetheless culminates in suffocating crying is something we owe to the bitter runs of the saxophone.

10.  사랑해 (I Love You) 🎧

It was released exclusively on the Special Edition. The song is an earlier composition that Rain recorded as a special gift for the Rain Effect Special Edition. The lyrics can once again be interpreted in two ways: they can be read as a personal confession to a single individual, but equally as a message to the fans.

(Author's screenshot)

10 (11.) 30 Sexy (East4a Deeptech Mix) 🎧

The record ends with the double-tempo mix of 30 Sexy, which on the one hand makes the track much more danceable, and on the other hand gives a peculiar, more nervous atmosphere to the original song, conjuring up again the two aforementioned precedents, and looking toward the future with an excited, restless vibration.

In summary: in his first author's album, Rain performs a surprising thing. He put on the table a string of songs that is pop music to the core, has a contemporary soundscape, is playful and varied, and is largely suitable for dancing as well, and these songs carry the heavy messages packed into them in such a way that they do not become weighed down by them for a single moment.

How did the already quoted film director Park Chan-wook put it regarding Rain?

"What is truly surprising about Ji-hoon is that a sort of rage, a desire for revenge, and sadness—all the shades of darkness—materialize in his case in an extremely optimistic and cheerful way." [1]

He was right to a vast extent.

.  .  .

[1]
Park Chan-wook made this remark at the press conference for the film *I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK* in May 2006.

Crossroads - Krisztián Gergye: E. SCH. EROTO

The convergence of Javanese dances and expressionist visual art in an extraordinary choreography 

Archival video still from Krisztián Gergye’s E. SCH. EROTO.

A Devastating Experience

It was not entirely independent of my curiosity about the dancer that in 2008 we signed up for the Natural Disasters Collective's bus trip, 'Death Tours,' whose final stop among several urban stations led to the MU Theater. Rhyming with its title, the performance Pre-Actio can best be described as action-theater, which did not unfold so much before us, the audience, but rather happened to us, as participants. Setting aside the presentation of the performance's multifaceted philosophy for now, I would highlight only one moment. We shared the last forty minutes of a suicide bomber's life.

My original ticket to the Natural Disasters Collective’s ‘Death Tours’ performance
at the Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, November 21, 2008.

As we mill around with many others in a dimly lit room, looking at the portraits with names scattered all under our feet, and various personal items that shock with their presence as mementos of a tragic event, digital displays on the side of a podium in the center of the room count down the ruthlessly passing time. Through table-like projectors placed flush with the floor, we can monitor a man's ritual preparation, though we cannot know exactly what he is preparing for. The crowd we are part of moves around the room just like anywhere in the city's squares and streets. In this faceless surging, it is not our eyes but rather a sort of sixth sense that signals the change: our attention is drawn to a motionless figure who looks like he is just one of us, but he is not, after all, we were just watching his ritual a moment ago. Now he stands among us, carrying a backpack, as casual as any of us, only the tension radiating from him is different, as well as the fact that, just like at the moment of birth, he is stark naked. He crawls up onto the podium, and the dance of death begins. Struggling out of the grip of fear and determination, the bare human body slowly dresses in festive attire, the first step of which is strapping on the explosives. The spasms of agony transfigure into the calm of irrevocability. The man standing in the spotlight on the podium is ready for the final movement, and we are standing right near him. In the silent moment of detonation, the room is plunged into darkness, the bomber simply vanishes, and we are left there—virtually blown up. The suicide bomber was embodied by Krisztián Gergye, and anyone who was present there will never forget the concentrated depth into which he dragged us all.

Far and Yet Close

Indonesia's unique art exerts an elemental impact on almost everyone who comes into contact with it. One could list at length the names of defining theater makers, musicians, and visual artists whose life's work was decisively influenced by Indonesian music, theater, or refined craftsmanship. Antonin Artaud's thinking was completely reshaped by the experience of a Balinese theater performance, while the actors of Eugenio Barba's company, Odin Teatret, practically felt at home on the island of Bali, where they immersed themselves in the traditions of local theater. For those more versed in popular music, it may suffice to evoke the name of Mike Oldfield here; his music, including the Tubular Bells album, is permeated by the sounds of the gamelan.

A young Hungarian man fared no differently when, in 1996, he enrolled in the Indonesian dance course of dance artist Bagus Kentus Norontako, who had arrived in Budapest from the Yogyakarta Sultanate. As a result of the course, he became a member of the Norontako Javanese Dance Group, and shortly thereafter, we could see him as a regular performer, a Javanese dancer at domestic Indonesian cultural and embassy events.

After a brief interlude spent mastering classical ballet and modern dance techniques, he won the Darmasisswa scholarship in 1998 and traveled to Yogyakarta on the island of Java for a year. As a student at the Institut Seni Indonesia (Indonesian Institute of the Arts), he immersed himself in the world of traditional Javanese dances. His diligence was boundless; alongside his official studies, he attended additional private institutions through his own financing, where renowned teachers introduced him to specialized dance styles such as the refined male and female styles, or the Menak style. Thanks to his talent and preparation, he was even able to perform at the sacred events of the Yogyakarta KERATON Sultan's Palace, which is considered a privilege. This young man is none other than Krisztián Gergye, who a few years later became one of the defining figures of Hungarian contemporary dance and theater arts.

A traditional Javanese Wayang Topeng (masked dance) performer.
Photo: Tropenmuseum, part of the National Museum of World Cultures (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Javanese dances, like the dance arts of many countries around the world, can be divided into two major families: court dances and folk dances. While the latter is rather full-blooded and lively, court dance represents refinement and elegance, which is often paired with a philosophical message.

Just like the Indonesian Wayang theater (puppet shadow play), the group of masked dances, which is clearly distinguishable among the numerous types of dance, is also strongly related to the rich genre of storytelling.

Performers of topeng dance (masked dance) wear various masks to go with their ornate attire, and they perform fairy-tale or mythical stories accompanied by a gamelan orchestra. The dancers portray the forces of nature, characters from adaptions of the Indian epics—the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which are highly popular in the region—as well as legendary kings and heroes. The most popular story, however, is the local Panji cycle originating from the 12th century, which tells the love story of Prince Panji and Princess Chandra Kirana, who are incarnations of the male and female deities of love.

The first written record of a topeng dancer wearing a gold mask dates back to the 14th century. The most developed forms of masked dances evolved on the islands of Bali and Java, but local variations can be found in every region of the Indonesian archipelago. The masks are extremely diverse, distinguishable by gender, occupation, social status, serious or humorous characters, animals, and divine figures; different, full masks were worn by silent characters, while speakers wore half-masks. In many cases, masked dances were integrated into the courtly dance-theater performances that formed part of the aristocrats' entertainment, which were called "human wayang" under the name Wayang wong or Wayang orang, distinguishing them from puppet shadow theater.

"I am human, I love death and love life."

This line was written by an Austrian painter who died very young in 1918 at the age of 28, Egon Schiele, in his poem Self-Portrait [1]. His ten-year recognized and successful—though not free from animosity and scandals—painting career, during which he became a leading figure of Viennese Expressionism, fed on the ruthless and unbiased examination and exposure of his complex personality. In the life-feeling of a decadent world drifting into war, closing the golden age of peace, faith in progress and in man's world-shaping ability falls into crisis. The understanding of change was sought through several paths, two of which are particularly characteristic of the era: one approach performed the meticulous and merciless dissection of the personality using scientific and philosophical tools (like Freud), while the other constituted a group of esoteric teachings offering the possibility of finding an ultimate unity leading out of reality and beyond reality (see Steiner). Contact with both directions can be found in Schiele's oeuvre, which can also be interpreted as one giant, continuous confession of the intention for self-knowledge and self-understanding.

Egon Schiele: Self portrait - male nude with spreaded arms (Public Domain)

The main events of Schiele's personal life path compellingly contribute to this self-examining attitude. His relationship with death and the female sex finds its explanation in the foundational experiences of his childhood. While constantly struggling with the lack of maternal love, at the age of 14 he loses his father, who represented a secure emotional anchor and who dies of syphilis with a broken mind.

Schiele constantly shatters rules and transgresses norms, so much so that while still practically a child, he even becomes entangled in the suspicion of an incestuous relationship with one of his sisters. Growing up, although he is able to appear in the wider world as a fashionable man-about-town, he continues to carry his internal problems with him, which are soon joined by financial difficulties. He enters into a domestic partnership with the 17-year-old Wally, one of Klimt's models, and during their life together, the woman becomes one of the core subjects of Schiele's painting.

In the painter's depictions, however, it is not the woman's personality that dominates, but much rather Schiele's unresolved relationship with the female sex, with emotions, and with the bodily relations of sexuality. While he also escapes into the experience of lovemaking, throwing himself into the pleasures of the flesh, in his pictures he distances women from himself, often freezing them into faceless, extreme, contorted poses, scrutinizing them closely while ignoring the taboos of body depiction, thereby simultaneously degrading the representatives of the opposite sex into sexual objects and demeaning his own desires and experiences. Yet out of the ugly, a kind of beauty is born, because the unique harmony of the paintings speaks—perhaps unintentionally—of the true, deep, and agonizing desires of the soul.

Egon Schiele's self portraits (Public Domain)

Schiele's landscapes and cityscapes all bear witness to man's sense of discomfort. He persistently searches for the key to understanding himself, making his own persona the subject of his painting career. Throughout an astonishing number of 170 self-portraits, he walks the paths of self-examination in various states of mind, and he does not shy away from putting on pathological grimaces and gestures either, for the sake of studying extremes.

He creates his most scandal-inducing series of pictures about the street children who frequent his studio, for which he is sentenced to prison, the works being interpreted as pedophilia. In the pictures, the children often look at us with aging, wrinkled bodies and indifferent gazes, so the paintings testify much rather to the ruthlessness of existence and passing away than to morbid inclinations. Schiele was not particularly shaken by the punishment; in fact, he conveyed the feelings that arose during his 24 days of confinement in his drawings with documentary fidelity.

Egon Schiele: Woman with Green Stockings (Public Domain)

His life together with Wally came to a short and abrupt end when, after a brief acquaintance, he decided to marry the middle-class, Protestant Edith Harms. Despite the protests of the girl's parents, the wedding was held on the very day that was the marriage date of Schiele's parents. Although Schiele perhaps hoped he could keep both women, Wally left him immediately and went abroad as a military nurse, where she died of scarlet fever two years later.

On the third day after his wedding, Schiele received military conscription orders. He was ordered to Prague, where his wife followed him as well. Thanks to his reputation and the recognition of his talent, he was not cut off from the possibility of creating even during his two years of military service.

Returning to Vienna, the hope of concentrating on his career and a harmonious family life finally flashed before him in 1918. His wife was expecting a child, but in the sixth month of her pregnancy, she was carried away by the Spanish flu epidemic raging in Europe, which did not spare Schiele either; he followed his wife and child three days later.

In his final and unfinished painting, which perhaps prefigured the desired state of harmony, the painter's questioning gaze is nevertheless fixed upon us, as if expecting the answer to the question of the meaning of life from us alone.

Crossroads

It has been 24 years since a solo dancer was awarded the prize for best dancer in Budapest at the 8th Alternative Theater Festival. For me, this performance becomes more and more vivid with every viewing, and beneath its successively peeling layers, newer and newer dimensions reveal themselves every single time. The dancer who dreamed up this unique phenomenon onto the stage and brought it to life is also Krisztián Gergye. The title contains a reference to Egon Schiele, and the dance unmistakably draws from the world of Javanese dances.

Archival video still from Krisztián Gergye’s E. SCH. EROTO.

By then, Krisztián Gergye had already embarked on the path of claiming contemporary dance and shaping his own independent identity. However, for the stage formulation of the questions burning inside him, the Javanese dance culture—which he was perhaps most in possession of—was available to him, though in its original form, it was unsuited to become the vehicle for current ideas. But Gergye was brave enough to take a step by which he liberated the movements bound by tradition and, through creative reformulation, created a peculiar contemporary dance. He puts it this way in his own ars poetica:

"...through the formal language of dance, calling forth those internal, inherently instinctive deep-beings (role-personalities) that often affect our lives, whether suppressed or with excessive dominance. The awakening of these beings is the primary condition for communication with ourselves without lies, and a possibility for understanding and accepting our ever-deepening personality layers. According to traditional Javanese philosophy, dance brings to life those 'divine' characters that, by their mere presence, are capable of mediating the meaning of human existence, the ideal human state. For observers, these beings are possibilities for relation, objects of meditation, which can have a teaching, guiding significance in a person's life. While the viewer is primarily the observer of the meditation, the dancer (the meditator), losing the dominance of their personality, must be the 'vessel' of the divine being itself.

Traditional Javanese dance provides an opportunity for the manifestation of the divine ideal figure through the suppression of human, 'civilian' emotions. The formal language of contemporary Javanese dance, however, builds upon bringing to the surface the repressed desires and secret emotions residing in our deepest selves. The unique meditation of Javanese dance is the middle path itself. How well I can place myself into it perfectly reveals my human flaws.

The contemporary, on the other hand, points out my most extreme states of being. Living them out and experiencing them provides a possibility for relation to the harmony of the center." [2]

Archival video still from Krisztián Gergye’s E. SCH. EROTO.

Archival video still from Krisztián Gergye’s E. SCH. EROTO.

This shift in emphasis regarding the role of the dancer—that is, the individual—rhymes very much with Schiele's own problematics. Just as Schiele examined his own essence as a painter, Gergye turns with the same motivation toward mapping his own personality as manifested in dance. Schiele becomes simultaneously a conceptual inspiration and an animated visual reality. Although the spectacle rhymes with the paintings, the voyage of discovery takes place within the dancer himself. Again, the words of Krisztián Gergye on this:

"For me, Schiele's pictures are self-recognitions. 'Like tilted mirrors,' secret analogies of my own inner selves. Searching within myself, I create my self-portrait through his portraits. (...) Motionless beings. Dancing. Rigid, cramped, bony desires and gestures. Their honesty is not an accusation, not an attack. Only recognition and self-acceptance." [3]

The Javanese masked dance blended with contemporary dance provides an excellent opportunity for the anima and animus living within us—that is, the woman living in the man and the man living in the woman—to be present on stage almost simultaneously, or rather, to manifest in an interchanging, mutually transforming way within seconds. According to Jung, alongside the conscious, dominant half that determines our gender, it is the subordinate half existing in the unconscious that selects the partner suited to us like a precise compass. In Gergye's performance, this inside-out, upside-down game is present throughout; the fronts get swapped, the front side is not the opposite, but merely the inverse of the back side, and the body present alone on stage thus personifies the two components of being that live within it.

Archival video still from Krisztián Gergye’s E. SCH. EROTO.

The male and female souls are multifaceted in themselves, both struggling for their own fulfillment. In Gergye's contorted movements, Schiele's figures look back at us, while the frontal reversal of the Javanese mask dance lends a necessary grotesqueness to the rich spectrum that manifests at times as erotically provocative, at times as referring to primary physical desires, and at times in delicate spiritual vibrations. The body is not only the carrier and expression, but can also be the prison of the soul locked inside it; the dancer's figure, turning into a living exclamation mark from time to time, expresses this condition, which, pointing to itself as a feat involving desperate effort, attempts to dismantle or perhaps sublime the physical immutability of the bone-muscle-skin body-complex.

Archival video still from Krisztián Gergye’s E. SCH. EROTO.

The dancer is simultaneously a real being and an irrational, animated painted figure upon which the brushstrokes are still present, as if he had just stepped out of the two dimensions of the canvas into that space where a beam of light, evoking the red color of both blood and lust, leads to the point where the primary instinctuality of our body gains a culturally codable "packaging." The whorish black stockings pulled onto male legs slip under the elegant clothing, and the most ethereal femininity is conjured forth. And the gestures continuously point to the head, perhaps indicating that consciousness must grapple with all of this? How far from simple this is, is illustrated by the shattering sequence of movements in which the male and female beings stare us in the face, alternating second by second, while the body becomes akin to a worn-out toy doll, every single body part of which has already been horroristically twisted out of shape.

Although E. SCH. EROTO bows its head before Schiele, it does so in a way that focuses more sharply than anything else on the questions to which even the ruthlessly passing time has brought no answers.

Krisztián Gergye's performance is an exceptional experience reaching across time and space, in which seemingly distant worlds organicize into one, joined seamlessly by the musical fabric woven from the music of Schubert, John Cage, Ágens, and Marilyn Manson as a worthy sonic backdrop to the unparalleled spectacle.

Sources:

[1]
Translation of Egon Schiele’s poem A Self-Portrait (1910) provided by the Leopold Museum, Vienna.

[2]
http://tancelet.hu/tancosok-koreografusok/187-gk-impersonators-gergye-krisztan-tarsulata

[3]
https://szinhaz.hu/2002/04/19/viii_alternativ_szinhazi_szemle_278

Wanderer on the Superhighway: Paik Nam June

An insight into the visionary universe of the world’s first media artist

Nam June Paik: Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995). Smithsonian American Art Museum. Photo: Steven Zucker (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Nam June Paik Estate

I have been planning to write about one of the most famous Koreans, Nam June Paik—the world's first media artist—for a long time. The exhibition that has opened at the Korean Cultural Center now provides a particularly good occasion for this, as it focuses on the works of the contemporary generation in a way that continuously reflects on the great predecessor in the background. Therefore, it is not useless to linger a little on the question of who Nam June Paik is and why he is so important.

The history of modern art is, in fact, nothing less than the history of a series of questions being raised, and consequently, the history of losing traditional anchors. Every element of the academic concept of art has been questioned since the inception of the avant-garde, and the answers have led to surprising results. At first, disconcerting questions were asked only within the scope of individual branches of art regarding their subject matter, form, and essential carrier materials, which were soon followed by propositions dissecting the boundaries between everyday life and art, just as by experiments with the permeability and cooperation of individual artistic branches. Art moved out into the street, the utilitarian objects of everyday life moved into museums, the viewer entered the process of creation, and the artist often created almost nothing but conceptual ideas... yet all this still within the reality of colors, forms, sounds, bodies, objects, and in real-time processes. Up until the electronic medium was born: television, followed by a technical multitude of image recording and playback devices, from videotape to the computer.

Everyone knows the history of television also in the respect that the device itself is just an object; life is breathed into it by the broadcaster, which in the beginning was a state privilege everywhere—and it is largely still so today. The well-earning citizen buys the device, pays the monthly service "tax," and in return can enjoy the centrally rationed mind alteration designed for one-way consumption. We know that Orwell had a shocking social vision regarding this—famous for the concepts of the "Two-Way Telescreen" and "Big Brother is Watching You" (George Orwell: 1984, Secker & Warburg, 1949)—but what business could art have with all this? The question was posed by Nam June Paik, and he gave a resounding answer to it.

Portrait of Nam June Paik. Photo: Unknown author,
cropped by Shizhao (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons.

How Paik, born on July 20, 1932, in Korea—historically one of the most isolated countries in the world, which moreover was precisely under annexation at the time—became the number one media artist of the globalizing world would in itself be worth a biographical novel, or perhaps more stylishly a film, an unconventional internet performance.

Nam June was born as the fifth child of a textile manufacturer. He loved music and the arts, and also studied piano in Seoul. The family fled the Korean War to Hong Kong in 1950, and soon after they moved to Japan, where the boy attended university. At the University of Tokyo, he studied art, music history, and philosophy, and then in 1956, he wrote his graduation thesis on the work of composer Arnold Schoenberg. His path led to Germany, where over the next two years he studied music history at the University of Munich and composition at the Freiburg Conservatory. During this time, he came into contact with the Fluxus group, whose name referred to the constantly fluctuating, changing nature of their activities. The members of the group, denying the boundaries between life and art in the Neo-Dadaist spirit of "Everything is art" and "Everybody is an artist" (philosophical concepts popularized by Joseph Beuys and the international Fluxus movement, c. 1960s), created their works characterized by experimentation, playfulness, and the blending of different forms; thus Paik also crossed experimental music with theatrical performance. Yoko Ono also belonged to the group, whom they had already met in Japan.

Nam June Paik: Victrola (2005). Photo by the author, taken at Tate Modern.

Among contemporary composers, Paik also worked together with Karlheinz Stockhausen, but the greatest influence was made on him by John Cage, who on one hand started him towards the electronic arts, and following whom he moved to America, to New York, in 1964—inspired by Cage's definitive philosophy: "Art is not an escape from life, but a penetration into it." (John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan University Press, 1961).

But before that, in 1963, he made his debut in Wuppertal as part of the exhibition "Exposition of Music: Electronic Television." He placed thirteen television sets in a room, some of which were not turned on, some displayed no image, and the rest showed distorted images that Paik created using magnets placed around the TVs. In addition to music, he was also fascinated by the technical possibilities of television and video. Working together with engineer Shuya Abe, they created the first video synthesizer, with which they were able to modulate the original image and transform the image on the TV screens into abstract pictures with an external magnet.

Nam June Paik: Nixon TV (1965/2002). Photo by the author, taken at Tate Modern.

This play ran counter to the centrally controlled application of televisions described above. However, the production of "one's own show" received a huge boost in 1965 with the appearance of Sony's first video camera, as the camera offered an easily portable tool accessible to anyone for electronic image-making. And this also served the philosophical approach not foreign to Paik, which was about making image-making—and the creative process itself—democratic, destroying the rights arrogated to themselves by power monopolies.

Paik's works, on one hand, extract the television set itself as an object from the world of homes and place it in another context as part of exhibition objects. On the other hand, he detaches the devices from the ready-made broadcast stream and fills them with his own content. In doing so, he also experiments with the technical possibilities of audio and video delivery devices.

However, these experiments are not self-serving. Paik is fascinated by the concept of time in relation to human life—in general, as a philosophical question, and also in relation to the possibilities offered by the new medium. "The future is now" (Nam June Paik: Video 'n' Videology 1959–1973, Everson Museum of Art, 1974), he declares, and with this, he attributes a future-shaping effect and responsibility to all our current decisions and actions, emphasizing that the future is not an entity existing independently of us, occurring sometime just like that, hypothetically.

Nam June Paik: Three Egg (1975–1982). Photo by the author, taken at Tate Modern.

Video technology makes him reflect and prompts him to insights in which he predicts many phenomena of the reality of our current age with astonishing accuracy. He recognizes that electronic image recording and replayability are the first to be able to disrupt the linear flow of time and enable, for example, the experiencing of chronologically successive events in a reversed chronological order.

The youth of today perhaps cannot even imagine that at the dawn of image recording, putting the videotape into the device, we could only proceed linearly, but we could not jump from one part to another like on today's DVD or especially in a digital file. Paik could not know about all this, nor could he see digital television, yet he writes these:

"Video tape can be rewound, but our lives can’t. There are four buttons on the VCR: 'Fast Forward,' 'Fast Rewind,' 'Go,' and 'Stop.' But our lives have only one button: 'Go.' Today we have the Betamax, this machine that surpasses even God, since man can see the play starting at nine even before the seven o'clock news. Such a thing never happens in life. If I had known at age 25 how I would feel in New York as a 47-year-old poor artist, I would have planned my life differently. We cannot know anything in advance; our lives have no 'Fast Forward and Rewind' button. Therefore, we proceed step by step and try to correct our mistakes with further mistakes. On the other hand, we hire teachers and pay for their work, because the teacher, just like the Betamax, can also fast-forward." (Nam June Paik: Historical Context and Future of Video Art, 1980 / Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Nam June Paik, MIT Press, 2000).

But let us return to non-temporal information. Temporal and non-temporal information are distinguished from each other by the two types of storage modes. The "book" is the most ancient form of non-temporal information. Television and video tape are bad because both are temporal information systems. Man has not yet learned how to properly record and store temporal information because the phenomenon is new. No one claims that the Encyclopedia Britannica is a boring read, despite the fact that it contains a lot of information, because a lexicon can be opened at any of its pages, at the letter A or B, at C, at M, and at X as well, but when man watches video or television, he must go through the entire alphabet. Although the comparison is simple, the difference is nevertheless great. Therefore, the book will remain alive until electronic information overcomes the problem of non-temporal information.

Nam June Paik: I’m a Painter too (1993). Photo by the author, taken at Tate Modern.

He predicts technical solutions that are already a natural part of our lives:

"Painting in the next century is likely to be electronic wallpaper that can easily be programmed for simple or complex images. There will be standardized electronic canvases, so that if one wants to exhibit one's pictures in Ireland or the Republic of the Congo, one simply mails a program card, which is plugged into the machine on site, and the canvas lights up behind it. Such a system must come into being, otherwise communication among artists will cease. Photography will also be electronic, which by the way can be traced back to the same energy situation. Since film stock is becoming more and more expensive, there is no point in taking photographs. If one records a situation electronically and can make a high-quality paper print from this, one skips the chemical processes. The next step will be the development of electronic cameras. It will be possible to take photos even under poor light conditions, so nobody will have secrets. Even today we see miniature video cameras. Devices similar to Super 8 will appear, in which both the camera and the recorder will be built-in, and they will make high-quality recordings on one-hour video tape." (Nam June Paik: Historical Context and Future of Video Art, 1980 / Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Nam June Paik, MIT Press, 2000).

Nam June Paik: Untitled (Newspaper Drawing) (2003).
Photo by the author, taken at Tate Modern.

His artistic reflections also lead to thought-provoking insights regarding the problems of the present age:

"The oil and energy crisis can therefore be traced back to the problem of weight. Today there is an oil crisis because for millions of years we transported the 60-kilogram human body with the help of a 60-kilogram human body. But in the last 50 years, we transport the 60-kilogram body with a 300-kilogram car. This is the stupidest system the world has ever invented." (Nam June Paik: Selected Writings, c. 1970s). "Art's job is to think about the future. Currently, however, it is difficult to predict the future. Herman Kahn, the best-known futurologist, was wrong about two things. In 1967, he published his study about the year 2000. He spent a lot of scientific fellowships writing the book, but in 1967, Kahn did not mention ecology and environmental pollution with a single word. In 1967, the hippies were dealing with ecology. Kahn, the best-known futurologist, understood even less about things than the hippies. After this, in 1970, this same Mr. Kahn wrote a book about the seventies, and in it, he did not commemorate the energy crisis with a single word. Even today, he still makes a living being a futurologist." (Nam June Paik: The Future of Art and Technology, Lecture transcripts, 1980).

Paik foreshadowed the image of the "global world village" back when the internet did not even exist, and the creation of a concept is also credited to his name: he first used it in 1974, and much later, the title of one of his works became "Electronic Superhighway." Twenty years later, when "information superhighway" became a commonplace term, Paik jokingly said: "Bill Clinton stole my idea."

Nam June Paik: Untitled (Collage with Playing Card Motif and Drawing) (1990s).
Photo by the author, taken at Tate Modern.

The artwork titled “Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii" was created using 336 television sets, 50 DVD players, and 575 feet (170 meters) of neon light. The massive, 40 by 15-foot (12x4 meters) neon-video sculpture shapes the map of the United States, and on the TVs of each individual state, a broadcast characteristic of it can be seen—for example, in the territory of Kansas, a clip from the movie The Wizard of Oz, or in the territory of Alabama, footage taken of Martin Luther King. The artwork is thus also defined by how much Paik himself understood America and its cultural phenomena.

Orwell's vision did not let Paik rest either. Of course, he was aware of all the dangers of the watching eyes of "Big Brother" penetrating individual living spaces. With no small amount of irony, the year 1984 was launched on January 1st by Paik's project, which was the first "satellite installation." However, disputing the dangers, he placed the emphasis on the advantages offered by technology, with which it can serve communication and cultural understanding between different countries and peoples—conceptualized in his famous satellite broadcast project titled "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell" (Nam June Paik: Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, WNET/Thirteen, Center for New Art Activities, 1984). The program was broadcast across America by national television, in Paris by the Pompidou Center, as well as by several stations in Germany and South Korea, to a total of about 25 million viewers 

[Vintage TV] Good Morning Mr. Orwell; Pilobolus: What Grows in Huygen's Window, Oneiric,
Sally In The Garden (Arts & Entertainment Network Cable 1984) (Video via Internet Archive)

Paik was preoccupied with Zen Buddhism throughout his life; we encounter its imprint at every turn in his works. He never smoked, never drank alcohol, and never drove a car. Yet, to the question of whether he was a Buddhist, he answered, "No, I am an artist." At the same time, the essential thoughts of Zen are inherent in his works—in the broadcast-replacing candle placed inside the TV box just as in "Zen for Film." In the latter, the projector in the empty room projects a film on which nothing can be seen. And Zen says to understand life intuitively, without thoughts or language. Look inside yourself to discover the truth, clear your mind, and simply be, rather than do something; think instead of speaking. In a chaotic and noisy world, this is the possibility of achieving peace and tranquility.

Of course, the creation also raises a question of art theory, namely whether the projection of an imageless light frame is film, similarly to how Cage also played with the possibility of music without sound consisting purely of a pause in 4'33"—echoing Cage's definitive Zen-inspired principle: "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear." (John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan University Press, 1961).

Paik also hands out playful jabs in bringing together Western technology and Eastern spirituality. The Buddha of the TV Buddha series contemplating his own projected image speaks equally about the question of "who is watching whom?", the self-complacency of the situation, the intrusive and mesmerizing nature of the television media into the private sphere, as well as the Buddhist belief in reincarnation with the endless cycle of "I watch the one who watches me."

Nam June Paik: TV Buddha (1974). Video installation with bronze sculpture and monitor.

Photo by "gregoryg" on Flickr / Creative Commons.

Paik confoundingly united the world created by man with the natural one in his works. He professed that these two must be in balance because man cannot exist without either.

Nam June Paik: TV Garden (1974/2000). Video installation with live plants and monitors.
Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum / via Flickr.

Paik's oeuvre cannot be presented even in outline within the scope of an article like this. But the pieces of perhaps the most playful series, which he built with immense creativity, cannot be left out. The sculptures shaping three generations of family members and other famous people mostly came together from discarded, old TV and radio sets into individual pieces, full of character and recognizable by their namesake. Originally based on the idea of remote-controlled toys, the robots capable of walking and talking were made, which later became static; only their screens remained in motion, making them alive.

The first remote-controlled robot, K-456 (1964), met a sad end. In 1982, Paik took it out to the street from the exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art and directed it onto the roadway, where a car hit it. All this formed part of a documented performance, with which Paik wished to express the "catastrophe of twentieth-century technology" and stated: "We must learn to live with it." (Nam June Paik: "The First Accident of the Twenty-First Century" Performance, 1982 / Archived in Whitney Museum of American Art Records, 1982).

Nam June Paik: Bakelite Robot (2002).

Photo by the author, taken at Tate Modern.

One of Paik's biggest projects was connected to the Olympics held in Seoul in 1988 and bore the title "Wrap Around the World." Measured by the standards of the time, it was a global event, because although there were no such developed connections between continents as today, ten countries participated in the live event and it had over 50 million viewers. Everyone shaped their own message, which mainly concentrated on entertainment; thus images of kung fu and pop music arrived from China, salsa from Rio de Janeiro, a rainy motorcycle race from Ireland, a concert held in the parking lot of Brahms's birthplace from Hamburg, and the Die Toten Hosen performance in front of Beethoven's birthplace from Bonn, to which New York contributed with footage of the Earth taken from space. A lot of pop musicians and other stars of the art world participated in the project from David Bowie to Merce Cunningham.

Nam June Paik: The More the Better (1988) at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. Photo by perspective (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.

This extraordinary occasion led Paik back to his homeland, with which his connections had been severed for twenty years. Korea also bowed its head before the prodigal son who had achieved world fame, and the huge birthday cake of the Olympic project, which Paik built from 1,003 televisions, went to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul under the title "The More the Better" (1988). Self-irony towards himself, and a small question mark next to the aspirations of Korea wishing to catch up with the world's leading economic powers. Around the huge tower of Babel consisting of TVs sat Korean drummers, and Paik, who had started from his homeland as a composer, now put on the hanbok, and while they served a real birthday cake that served as the model for the installation, Paik's words were repeated: "Keep music going."

Paik suffered a stroke in 1996, which paralyzed one side of his body. Although he could walk with assistance, he spent the last decade of his life mainly in a wheelchair, but worked actively even like this. He died in Miami, Florida, in 2006, leaving behind a huge oeuvre inspiring generations. As the father of video art, he made a deep impression on successors such as one of the greatest today, Bill Viola.

Sources:

Nam June Paik Studios

www.paikstudios.com

An exhibition at two venues, Tate Liverpool and FACT

http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/6393

Nam June Paik Made Video Into a Modern Art Form

http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/nam-june-paik-made-video-into-a-modern-art-form-122065029/114436.html

Nam June Paik: Nem-időbeli információ

Fordította: Lugosi Lugo László

Forrás: http://www.intermedia.c3.hu/mszovgy1/paik.htm

Nam June Paik Wrap around the world

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/wrap-around-the-world/images/9/